As we can see from our limited and biased perspective, the universe is dying. The “whole” is expanding, the distances between galaxies are increasing at an accelerating rate, and as if that weren’t enough, galaxies aren’t forming as many stars as they used to. But why has this rate of star formation slowed down? It’s not because there’s not enough fuel to form new galaxies. Only about 10% of the gas in the universe is converted into stars. The mass of the planetary form is even smaller, 1,000 times less, indicating that there is enough material available to form new worlds. But something, both between and within galaxies, is preventing gas from producing new suns and planets (and potentially more life?) at the rate it once did.
The most likely culprit behind this phenomenon that is destroying our universe is the action of supermassive black holes, which are thought to exist at the centers of all galaxies. This theory is not immediately intuitive because these giant universes, despite having millions or even billions of times the mass of our Sun, are relatively small compared to galaxies.
For example, the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy is smaller than the orbit of Venus. If these supermassive black holes are indeed responsible for the galaxies spreading throughout the universe, then we have something very small on the galactic scale, and an area billions of times larger on the cosmic scale, affecting galaxies. You’re talking about something that’s affecting you. That in itself changes the structure of the entire universe. It is as if atoms could stop the growth of humans, as well as size proportions, and end the entire species and thus the entire life.
Evidence has been gathering for decades that the energy generated around supermassive black holes is enormous. A black hole has such a powerful effect on spacetime that it can twist everything around it, even warping time to a standstill. It is often said that even light cannot escape its gravity, but this view is somewhat outdated and has been superseded by the theory of general relativity. Nevertheless, this effectively illustrates the idea that even something as terrifying as a photon cannot escape the space-time well created by a black hole.
When an object, whether a cloud of interstellar gas or a star, passes close to a black hole but is still far enough away to not be consumed, it forms a disk around the dark entity. . As this material spirals inward, it experiences enormous tidal forces. This is often explained with the analogy that if you get too close to a black hole, you get stretched out like spaghetti. During this process, this material is heated to such extreme temperatures that it can emit light with a brightness equal to or greater than that of the entire galaxy containing the supermassive black hole. Even though galaxies can contain billions of times more mass, the radiant energy from the disk can cover the galaxy itself.
If the material around a black hole, known as an accretion disk, becomes very bright, the galaxy is classified as having an active galactic nucleus (AGN). In the most extreme type of AGN, a quasar, all we see is a disk of matter around the black hole. Its brightness completely obscures that of its host galaxy.
AGNi can exhibit not only the form of light, but also the phenomenon of releasing huge amounts of energy by ejecting matter at speeds close to the speed of light. This ejected material comes not from “inside” the black hole, where nothing can be ejected, but from just beyond the “point of no return” known as the event horizon. The ejected material appears as a jet that can spread over distances equivalent to tens or even hundreds of times the size of a galaxy like the Milky Way.
One example is Porphyrion, the discovery of which was revealed just a few weeks ago. Because the area around a black hole is so bright, the emitted light itself can exert pressure on the surrounding gas, causing material to be ejected. The fact that light can push objects in the same way that wind fills a sail is truly amazing.
While AGNi does release enormous amounts of energy and has been shown to eject large amounts of very hot gas from near black holes at supergalactic distances, it is currently not clear that AGNi There is no direct evidence to suggest that it may have an effect on What’s more, the cold gas needed for star formation fills the space between stars in galaxies, located far away from supermassive black holes.
Astrophysicists know what to look for to test this theory, but conducting such experiments is not so easy. We need to identify suitable galaxies where galactic decline is imminent or has recently occurred. Like detectives, we must collect information about the health of numerous galaxies and select the most promising candidates for further data collection.
However, choosing the right galaxy for study is not enough. Powerful telescopes such as the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) are also essential. The search for more direct evidence that supermassive black holes are contributing to the decline of the universe is one of the scientific objectives of JWST, which was jointly developed by NASA, ESA, and CSA (the American, European, and Canadian space agencies). It’s one.
Spain has been actively involved in the James Webb mission through researchers at the Center for Astrobiology (CAB), part of the National Institute of Aerospace Technology (INTA), and the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). Ta. The CAB team, working directly with the University of Cambridge, recently published a paper reporting the first detection of cold gas being ejected from a dying galaxy in the young Universe. This galaxy is called “Pablo’s Galaxy”. nature press release. I presented and defended my findings to the international team I had selected to collect the data at JWST. And a funny colleague (behind my back, I must say) named it.
This galaxy, which we’ll call GS10578 for the sake of modesty, is astonishingly massive, rivaling the Milky Way in size, and formed rapidly in a young Universe that was only 15% of its current age. In GS10578, we found direct evidence of the galaxy-killing effects of supermassive black holes. The black hole in this galaxy is still active, and we measured how it ejects large amounts of cold gas. Although we can’t directly observe this gas, we can detect its presence because it “clouds” the galaxy and absorbs some of the photons emitted by GS10578’s stars, which are in the same line of sight.
We continue to look for further evidence of the process by which AGNi siphons material from its host galaxy, leading to starvation. The fate of the dying GS10578, and ultimately the fate of all galaxies, including our own Milky Way, is the same. To disappear. The universe will no longer have any shining stars and will turn into something that appears hostile to us. This future scenario may no longer resemble our universe very much, highlighting how insignificant and limited our existence really is. It reminds us of the smallness of not only our lives, but also the matter that makes up the Earth, the Sun, and all the other planets and stars in the universe.
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